Dry wall from china

A story just broke by the Associated Press warning of rotten egg smell coming from drywall manufactured in China. Builders and contractors, take note and stay away from it until the matter is resolved.

A story just broke by the Associated Press warning of rotten egg smell coming from drywall manufactured in China. Builders and contractors, take note and stay away from it until the matter is resolved.

Until it is resolved? The only resolution is to stop buying ANYTHING from China.

Inphase277,
Since the recent problems from manufactured goods from China, I have been avoiding their "Made In" labeled goods. This problem with drywall is new to me. I believe I saw some new types of drywall at the homecenters. I'll take a closer look for the distributor and see if I can find out where its manufactured.
Some people may not realize also that a foreign product that has additional materials applied to it in our Country up to a certain percentage, is allowed by the government to have the "Made In America Label" attached. This makes it difficult to determine how much was manufactured where.

lafarge drywall isnt china, suprisingly not much isnt chinese. the lafarge plant is by where I live in lower hudson valley. I use to work for a tool rental when many years ago and they use to rent our teramite backhoe. that place is the dustiest place I've ever been too. just a constant cloud of gypsum dust blowing around.

Well, the 'made in China' angle may be relatively new - and IMO goes back about 3-4 years during the gypsum shortage in the US brought about by the hurricanes...- but it should surprise no-one that China can produce pretty well anything at a fraction of the cost that North Americans can. A gypsum plant is normally located close to mines so that transportation costs are kept to a minimum but that doesn't mean that it easy to put up a drywall plant. If you've ever seen a drywall plant running at full speed, you'd be in for a treat...

That board comes out at about 60 miles per hour, out of a puffing and wheezing machine that's about a football field in length. One mistake or one accident - and by the time the machine shuts down - there's 10 miles of rubbish gyproc hurled against a wall somewhere. We had 3 gyproc plants up here back in the '80s going full tilt day and night.

"Gypsum" is basically calcium sulphate; calcium sulphate contains sulphur; under certain conditions, sulphur can produce hydrogen sulphide which has a classic rotten egg smell. Hydrogen sulphide is corrosive to metals and turns metals behind a wall, say plumbing, black and weaker. In the long run this could cause problems.

Even discarded gypum panels can decompose to give off that rotten egg smell and since there was so much rubbish produced back then, it may not be surprising there's more rotten egg smell around.

But whether the rotten egg smell can be only attributable to "made-in-China" gyproc or not, I don't know.

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